Truth

Greetings good citizen,

Yet another day dawns over our crumbling civilization while our ‘anonymous leaders’ nod with satisfaction as their plans unfold unhindered…

Funny how the ‘prosperity’ of the post WWII era now looks like a propaganda campaign. We were only ‘prosperous’ because we ‘believed’ we were prosperous, (the man on the TV told us it was so!)

Now that we look back on it, not so much…

More interesting is the sudden ‘re-appearance’ of our ancient foe, Poverty.

Like polio and tuberculosis, the welfare state (allegedly) ‘exterminated’ poverty…but both of these medical scourges are back…and why do you suppose that is?

Because their old friend ‘poverty’ has returned and created fertile ground for these scourges to thrive in!

Then Willy Jeff Clinton killed welfare… and look who’s back!

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty -- inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious -- qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.

While I shake a crooked finger at a former president, the problem goes deeper than that. Poverty has ‘resurged’ because we have failed to abolish capitalism!

I almost wrote ‘predatory’ in front of the word capitalism but that infers that there is a non-predatory variety of capitalism and that simply isn’t true!

There’s just no way you can stack ‘fuck you, pay me’ into a non-predatory outcome!

Remember good citizen, if you can’t survive on what they pay you, it’s not their problem but YOURS!

Odd how this little ditty brings us full circle to the crux of the problem, one that few even acknowledge exists. One where if YOU ‘own’ the, er, ‘media outlet’, you get to decide what is or is not ‘true’.

It’s not that the ‘owner’ of the media can’t stand to look in the mirror, often they understand full well that they are ‘propagating falsehoods’.

But they also understand that if they, er, ‘offend’ their advertisers, they’ll starve.

Thus do we encounter the first line of ‘live on your knees’ cycle. You may know you’re doing the job ‘wrong’ but that’s the way the man cutting the paychecks wants it done.

YOU are in no position to question his judgement (if you want to keep that paycheck coming!) You just do it the way he pays you to do it and you shut up.

One of the most prevalent messages one learns down here on the bottom of the food chain is YOU aren’t being paid to think, you’re being paid to DO AS YOU’RE TOLD!

When outsiders question the (often unwise) methods of the owner that same individual is quick to point to the men themselves and claim that’s they way they WANT TO DO the job…(and it’s no skin off of his ass so long as it gets done on time, correctly!)

Things are set up the way they are because that’s the way BONEHEAD PAID to have them set up! But even the most casual observer knows that…so it is unclear whom, precisely, he thinks he’s fooling.

Which brings us to another serious issue, the ‘cattle in the chute’ dilemma.

For all of our (alleged) ‘freedoms’ you actually get to make very few choices ‘on your own’…which is to point out that your choices are limited by other factors that are beyond your control…

Your job on the back of a rubbish truck does not afford you a fully staffed ocean front estate with which to call ‘home’.

Which leads us to the rough edge of an entirely different problem that we won’t go into right here and now…(but I sure would like to!)

Back to ‘cattle in a chute’…and we aren’t talking ‘rodeo’ here good citizen, we’re talking ‘slaughterhouse’, which, ironically, makes those herding the rest of us to our doom, er, ‘cannibals’.

Despite the fact that they don’t ‘eat what they kill’ (not yet anyway.)

Just wait until they put a ‘price per pound’ on what our betters consider the largest ‘pest problem’ challenging their continued ‘rulership.’

Because at the end of the day good citizen it ALWAYS comes down to the question of ‘how far will you go in order to maintain your current level of privilege?’

How sad is it good citizen that the ‘honest answer’ to that question goes way beyond what would normally be considered ‘depraved’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner